The best GitHub repos: open source tools for AI
The best GitHub repos for AI work are hard to find, because GitHub trending rewards whatever is new rather than what is good.
These are the ones we install, read properly and ship with. Filter by category, licence, language and the AI tools each one works with.
This is my curated list of the best GitHub repos for building with AI in 2026.
Every repository on it is one I have installed, read properly, or shipped something with.
They are sorted by what they do rather than by what language they are written in. Agent frameworks, MCP servers, coding agents, prompt libraries, RAG and memory, and evals.
Star counts, language, licence and last commit date come straight from the GitHub API and refresh every day.
A project that stopped being maintained two years ago cannot hide behind an old number.
Check the licence before you ship, because plenty of popular repositories are source-available rather than open source, and some carry no licence at all.
You can filter the whole list by exactly that.
These pair with our AI connectors, agent skills, and AI tools.
Use the filters below to find the ones that fit your stack.
Browse all GitHub repos
VS Code Setup Guide
★ 1 · Shell · ActiveNavid Moazzez's VS Code setup for creators. The theme, extensions, and settings for running Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini in one window.
yt-dlp
★ 184k · Python · ActiveA feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
Whisper
★ 107k · Python · ActiveRobust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
Project Based Learning
★ 279k · Python · ActiveCurated list of project-based tutorials
Superpowers
★ 272k · Shell · ActiveAn agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works.
React
★ 247k · JavaScript · ActiveThe library for web and native user interfaces.
Ecc
★ 240k · JavaScript · ActiveThe agent harness performance optimization system.
Hermes Agent
★ 230k · Python · ActiveThe agent that grows with you
Matt Pocock Skills
★ 216k · Shell · ActiveSkills for Real Engineers. Straight from my.agents directory.
n8n
★ 201k · TypeScript · ActiveFair-code workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities. Combine visual building with custom code, self-host or cloud, 400+ integrations.
Free Domain
★ 193k · Markdown · ActiveFree domain registration and practical DNS learning resources for everyone.
Ollama
★ 178k · Go · ActiveGet up and running with Kimi-K2.6, GLM-5.2, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models.
Markitdown
★ 174k · Python · ActivePython tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.
Agent Skills
★ 169k · Python · ActivePublic repository for Agent Skills
Firecrawl
★ 167k · TypeScript · ActiveThe context API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.
Dify
★ 152k · TypeScript · ActiveBuild Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, with rich AI model and tool support on one collaborative workspace.
Javascript
★ 148k · JavaScriptJavaScript Style Guide
Agency Agents
★ 145k · Shell · ActiveA complete AI agency at your fingertips - From frontend wizards to Reddit community ninjas, from whimsy injectors to reality checkers.
LangChain
★ 144k · Python · ActiveThe agent engineering platform.
Claude Code
★ 141k · Python · ActiveClaude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks…
Excalidraw
★ 130k · TypeScript · ActiveVirtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams
Gstack
★ 128k · TypeScript · ActiveUse Garry Tan's exact Claude Code setup: 23 opinionated tools that serve as CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, Doc Engineer, and QA
ComfyUI
★ 127k · Python · ActiveThe most powerful and modular diffusion model GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface.
llama.cpp
★ 124k · C++ · ActiveA few options to get llama.cpp installed on your machine: Visit https://llama.
FAQs about top GitHub repositories
Have questions about GitHub repositories and which ones are worth using?
Find answers to the most common ones below.
Anyone can view and download a public repository. Cloning one gives you the entire project along with every change that has ever been made to it.
The list on this page is filtered by exactly those categories, and every repository on it is one we have installed or read properly rather than something pulled off GitHub trending.
GitHub search, topics pages and trending are all reasonable starting points. Curated lists like this one exist because trending rewards novelty rather than usefulness.
GitHub uses the full word repository across its own interface, so you will see both spellings in the docs and on the site.
A repository is open source only if it carries an OSI-approved licence such as MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL or BSD. Some popular projects are source-available instead, under licences like BSL, Elastic, SSPL or Commons Clause, which means you can read the code but you cannot build a competing commercial product on it. A repository with no LICENSE file at all is legally all rights reserved, so you may read it and do nothing else with it.
Use the licence filter above to see which is which.
Some of them are the open core of a paid hosted product, which means the code is free while the managed version is not. Where that applies, the drawer links out to the project's own site.
Install one and your agent can do the thing rather than describe it. We keep a full library of them at AI connectors.
Treat the number as a rough popularity signal and weight the last commit date, the open issue count and the number of contributors far more heavily. A project with nine hundred stars that ships every week is usually the better bet.
To get the code itself, run git clone followed by the repository URL, or download the ZIP from the green Code button.
The write-ups are ours and we revise them whenever something material changes about a project. We add new repositories most weeks.
If a repository you rely on is missing, tell us about it and say what you built with it.
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